Google Voice for Everyone in the USA

I have been using Google Voice for a couple years now (from when it was Grand Central). It is great. Now it is openly available



The messages "transcribed" and sent to your email is nice (though it is still fairly lame). The ability to force unknown numbers to announce themselves before being put through to your phone is awesome. No more spam calls at all. You can also send calls to any of your phones based on show is calling. Basically it is great and it is free. There are lots of features I don't even use but the best features for me are call screening and emails with the voice messages. I don't have to worry about giving my phone number to business that will then abuse the information they were provided -
Google Voice gives me control over who can ring my phone and who must first leave a message.

Related: Droid Incredible - Kiss Your Phone Bill Good-bye - Save Money on Cell Phone Service, Price Reductions - Google Operating System (Chrome)

Ubuntu and Linux Resources

• Ubuntu Kung-Fu





• order book from Amazon


• Ubuntu Pocket Guide - paper book from Amazon





• Linux-Unix cheat sheets - The ultimate collection

Related: Tips for Your First 24 Hours with Ubuntu - Ubuntu: Closing a Program That Won't Respond

Photo Management and Web Gallery Creation Software

What suggestions to people have for photo management and web gallery creation software. I don't need anything fancy. I have been using Picasa and it is ok. It does take me a long time to do some things though. And the latest version (Picasa 3.0 for Linux) seems to eliminate the main function I liked (replaced with only letting you upload photos to their web site).

Essentially what I have been doing is

• putting the photos I want in this gallery in one folder (these are the high resolution unedited photos)


• cropping the some of the photos


• using Picasa's make a web page feature (which automatically created thumbnails and let me set the maximum size of photos [say 800 pixels] and it reduced the image size - for web display)


• it also created pages for each of the photos (the idea is you could just upload the resulting files (html and jpg) to your site and you had a live web page

I like this model. I want to keep the photos on my Curious Cat Travels site - not some third party site (like Picasa Web, Flickr...). The most annoying thing about old process was I had to manually edit each page and the html Picasa generated wasn't really what I needed - so I just cut out a portion of the html from each page and pasted it into the template I had for my photo galleries.

Does anyone have suggestions for the best tools to do this using Linux?

I am installing digikam, now and will try it out.

Related: Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog - Using Your Digital Camera

Create Instant Screencasts

Screenr - create instant screencasts. Looks pretty cool.

Wordpress Plugins: Super Cache and Bad Behavior

Wordpress is a great blog platform. I started with blogger but switched to using Wordpress for my blogs (other than this one) several years ago. One great advantage to Wordpress are the great Plugins that are available. I have continually had problems with Super Cache and Bad Behavior, however. Getting errors including:

Cannot modify header information

[function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php on line 49

They are great plugins but seem to have not played together too well. They have tried to work out the problems and searches find explanations that this problem has been fixed. However I continued to have the problems when I upgraded a blog today. I tried various things that didn't help. I deactivated both and if I reactive super cache after bad behavior the errors seem to persist. However if I activated Super Cache and then Bad Behavior things seem to work fine.

Related: Gallery of Free WordPress Themes - 50 Wordpress Tutorials - Wordpress Admin Page Not Found - The First Blogger

Google Operating System

Google Chrome Operating System

the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.
...
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
...
The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Interesting.

Related: Ubuntu 7.1 - Viewing Unpersonalized Google Search Results - Google's Search Results: Should Factors Other Than User Value be Used - Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008

Gallery of Free WordPress Themes

WordPress Themes 4 Free is the newest curiouscat.com site. Find great, free, designs for your WordPress blog.

What Does This Error Mean

What Does This Error Mean - paste in an error message and read comments on what it means and how you can fix it.

Ruby on Rails Guides

Ruby on Rails guides - good documentation on the great programing framework.

Related: Ruby on Rails Job Opportunity - Joy in Work with RoR - Pleasing Customers

Maximize Firefox Using about:config

Maximize Firefox Without Extensions Using about:config

If you type about:config in your address bar, Firefox opens the master directory of user-defined preferences and built-in settings. The ultimate arena for performance tampering, the about:config settings are the foundation for programming Firefox extensions.
...
To modify about:config, pull it up using your address bar. The settings appear in a searchable list view.

Online Chess

Play chess online: Shredder Computer Chess

How to Install Anything in Ubuntu!

How to Install Anything in Ubuntu! - nice complete guide for folks new to Ubuntu.

Related: Why Desktop Linux Will Take off - Google Tech Webcasts #3

Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress Podcast

An interesting interview (podcast) with Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress Founding Developer. Wordpress is a great tool. This blog is still on blogger but my other 3 blogs use Wordpress:

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog
Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog

Related: posts on software development - some excellent freeware

Ubuntu 7.1

I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.1 today. It went very well. It was a large download but otherwise no problems at all. Simple download, upgraded Ubuntu and lots of supported applications. And it removed some no longer supported applications. It is a wonderful free operating system based on Linux for the desktop and very good for non-IT geeks. It automatically notifies you of updates and installs the updates with no need to reboot most of the time. Also it is Linux based and therefore very secure.

I did have one problem with Ubuntu last week. I could not download the photos from my digital camera. I tried various thing but couldn't figure it out. My friend was able to figure out there was a limitation in the software I was using that failed with over something like 1,000 photos (I had 1,085 photos from my trip). We tried another photos software but it failed too. I was able to delete some (that I got off the camera using a Windows computer at work) and then it worked fine.

Flashdrive Your Electronic Life

Portable Apps is an open source freeware initative that collects a ton of useful programs (Firefox, Gimp, Open Office...) that you can take with you on a flash drive and use on whatever computer is handy. This looks very cool.

via: Cool trick to make your life more portable

Backlink Tool

Check the pagerank of backlinks to your site. via Randa Clay

7 Clever Google Tricks Worth Knowing

There are lots of these list of tips. Some are good some are not. Here is one with some good ideas: 7 Clever Google Tricks Worth Knowing:

Find the Face Behind the Result... appending the code &imgtype=face to the end of the URL address after you perform a standard Google Image search.
...
Google + Social Media Sites = Quality Free Stuff... Examples: site:reddit.com free "wordpress templates"

Share a virtual Desktop Between Two Computers

Matt Cutts details how to share a virtual desktop between two different computers using Synergy.

Do you wish you could cut and paste between computers? Now you can! ... It's as if all your computers shared a single clipboard (and separate primary selection for you X11 users). It even converts newlines to each computer's native form so cut and paste between different operating systems works seamlessly. And it does it all in Unicode so any text can be copied.
...
Synergy also understands multiple screens attached to the same computer.

Looks very cool.